IE7 hangs when using (to much) ajax calls with async: false

Question

I have the following function in a much larger script that loads translations from a php file:

function loadLanguages(language){
 var data = new Object();
 data.language = language;
 var dataString = $.toJSON(data);
 var langSt = $.ajax({
  url: "/VID/ajax/loadtranslations.php",
  data: ({data: dataString}),
  async: false
 }).responseText;
 var languageArr = $.evalJSON(langSt);
 return languageArr;
}

Works in FF, but in IE7 and IE8 the browser will hang.. When I comment out the ajax call in the function IE doesn't hang. If I set it to async: true the function doesn't work anymore, but the browsers will not hang. Only if I set async to false, IE will hang. I'm a bit puzzled why!

Answer 1

You should never use async: false; it will always hang the browser until the request finishes.

This is a necessary consequence of the fact that Javascript is single-threaded, and will never change.